Driver puts foot down in Big Foot encounter

Midnight, March 5. A young man drives toward US 19 on Gulf Trace Boulevard in Holiday, Florida. He turns on his high beams where the road curves along some woods, just past the recreation centre.

His lights catch a pair of yellowish eyes, then a broad-shouldered figure, 2.5 to 3 metres tall, covered in brown hair. The creature freezes before running to the tree line. It stops to look back at the car.

The young man pulls over. There are no other vehicles on the road. He can now see the creature from the shoulders up. The man doesn't know why, but he thinks to yell, "Hi!" No answer. The creature disappears into the woods.

Believe it?

The young man sure seemed convincing when he reported the sighting to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organisation. It dispatched investigator Cathy Betz, whose job is to separate hoaxes from actual Bigfoot sightings in Florida's Pinellas, Pasco and Hernando counties.

She's never seen a Bigfoot herself, but she is convinced they exist. Someday, she says, we'll get proof.

Meanwhile, she'll keep her day job: saving lives as a registered nurse in the intensive care unit at the James A Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa.

Betz, 45, has believed in the cryptid ever since she was a little girl growing up in Florida and her father took her to see the 1972 docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek.

She read up on the subject, exploring evidence, and she became convinced that something was really out there. In 2003 she joined the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organisation.

She has been on four expeditions in Florida and one in North Carolina, and she is now on another in Utah. It was on the North Carolina expedition in 2008 that she had her closest encounter with Sasquatch.

At least she believes it was Sasquatch. It could have been a bear. Something walked around the tent, touching the fabric and grunting.

"I can't say with certainty what it was," Betz said, "but it was in a place with a lot of sightings."

Two days after the Holiday man said he saw a swamp monster, Betz met him at the scene. She compared his story to the version he submitted to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organisation online. It was consistent.

They searched for tracks but didn't find any. He told her he was sure he had not seen a bear or a human.

Betz's notes are secret, she says, in order to protect the witnesses. She says the young man did not want to be publicly identified.

She considers her role to be much like what a police investigator does.

"We don't want to be considered like a fluff organisation," she says. "In order to be taken seriously, we feel like we should separate out the stories that don't pan out."

As part of her investigations, she often cross-check facts, such as if the witness says it was a full moon. And she examines the area, looking for tracks, hair and other clues. She knows all about inspecting footprints for dermal ridges and mid-tarsal breaks.

"We're really a research and science-based organisation trying to get as much evidence as we can," she says. "We don't want people to think that we're just throwing everything out there that we get."

Henry Cabbage, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said Bigfoot's existence has not been confirmed. But the agency does keep a file on the subject, which includes news clippings and letters from people requesting permits to go out and catch one.